How long should an essay be?

This question may not seem pressing with all that’s going on. Few of you wake each morning wondering what to scribble to your pals. Let the Goldilocks prescription suffice: neither too long nor too short but just right! Only as usual, the deeper you dig, the knottier the quandary. How do we judge “just right”?

The question arose while reading the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. These too, I’ll wager, have not been bubbling on your front burner. Stevenson is famous for Treasure Island and maybe Kidnapped and, at a stretch, A Child’s Garden of Verses, which you read as a kid – and, oh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which morphed into a meme without being read. In his day (1850-1894), Stevenson topped England’s literary charts. If you’ve been to Samoa, you’ve visited the home where he died, because there’s little else to see on that cruise-ship-riddled island. You’ll likely be hearing more here about this poor skinny sickly amazingly original author because he and I are having a fling. I’m not sure how I bumped into him at this late date – I’m old enough to be his father! – but we did and now we’re hanging out.

Stevenson was celebrated in his hour as an essayist, in the tradition of Montaigne, Bacon, Dr. Johnson, and Thoreau, so we’re clubmates. Essays these days are much produced and little read. Everybody and his uncle wants to gas about their fascinating lives and their prose isn’t.

Stevenson’s prose is first-rate. He uses words with exciting precision, including plenty I don’t know. His dreamy, passionate, adventurous, world-weary personality pulses in his congenial phrasing. Tubercular, he spent most of his adult life dying. We read that everyone who knew him loved him – we’re not surprised.

His essays are lovable – but to my taste a little long. That reaction got me started on this meditation. What makes “too long”? Not word count. Not, in Stevenson’s case, talent. Not, I’m pretty sure, my impatience. He reminds me of what Stravinsky said about Schubert: “So what that you fall asleep if you wake up in heaven?”

“Just right” is a triangular tension – amidst cóntent, container, and consumer. The writer needs to say; the medium both facilitates and constrains expression; and the reader has expectations to be met. Any maker must sense when they’ve served too much, too little, or the right amount to sate an appetite.

Since an essayist is neither arguing nor persuading but schmoozing about his notions, he could go on and on, but at some point, enough already, his listener is yawning. How to gauge that tipping point? Why, while admiring Stevenson – and enjoying him – am I growing restive?

My theory is our moment. Stevenson was writing for folks with abundant leisure. The privileged classes in the late Victorian era were in no rush. No phones, computers, videos, email or social media plunged them into the roaring torrent of others’ lives. They weren’t alarmed by the latest political outrage or mortal threat. Reading – and writing – on paper! with pens! – was how they whiled the hours. A writer who wrote too short, shortchanging them, would have disgruntled. Who needs concision when you’ve got all afternoon?

I – and you (I’m guessing) – exist in a hectic hurry, harried by a brimming inbox and way too much to know, do, catch up with. Folks we care about are forever barging into our silence. While grateful for these minutes you’re spending here, yikes, I’ve got to make it quick.

Sagacity and celerity make uneasy bedfellows. Decelerating to Stevenson’s languid pace, albeit desirable, isn’t easy.